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Old 11-25-2004, 03:46 PM
srdiamond srdiamond is online now
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Join Date: 11-23-2004
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Re: Re: Re: Why Ultra Recall is so great!

Quote:
Originally posted by bkonia

* Idea! - Idea! seems to be more of a document manager than anything else. It could certainly be used for outlining and task management but the user interface design makes you do a lot of work to accomplish simple functions. It makes a clear distinction between categories and objects, and it supports cloning in the sense that an object can be assigned to multiple categories. It's certainly a lot better than ADM, but nowhere near as clean and intuitive as Ultra Recall. The learning curve looks fairly steep and I'm not sure that there would be a payoff to spending the time to really learn it.

Idea! kind of reminds me of InfoHandler in that all the objects are created in one big list and then you assign each object to one or more categories in the category tree. Maybe I'm missing something, but there doesn't appear to be a simple way to navigate through the tree and have the filters automatically update when you click on a particular branch to only show items relevant to that branch. Instead, you have to go through a convoluted process of dragging the branches into a filter area in order to define the filter for the object list.
Actually, I think Idea's learning curve is more apparent than real. It is somewhat unconventional as a Windows program, but there tend to be compelling reasons for its deviations. For instance, to navigate through the tree in the manner you describe, you merely have to check the little box labeled "AF" (Automatic Filter). But you're not the only one who didn't see it, and the documentation hasn't completely caught up with the program. Fortunately the tech support is superb. If you emailed the developer with your filter question, for example, you would probably have gotten an immediate answer.

Quote:
I have a strong bias against any application that makes me change the way I think in order to use it effectively and Idea! definitely falls into that category. One of the strengths of Ultra Recall is that it adapts to the way you think, rather than forcing you to learn the way it thinks.

I'm not sure I agree with your bias against programs requiring a change in the way you think. A potentially very interesting topic, once we got around to defining what constitutes a way of thinking.

But I see Idea! as a particularly flexible program, that doesn't require much change in the way one works , not to mention changing how one thinks. Basically the process is that one building an outline independently of the list of items, which is organized by dragging the items to the outline topics. The outline topics can then be used as implicit Boolean classes to form conjuncts and disjuncts.

I see Idea! and Ultra Recall as being the most sophisticated structured free form information managers available today. MyInfo may join their ranks with version 3, which is still in beta and I haven't seen, but is being previewed on its site.

But I'm inclined to think that in comparing these products, one should look primarily not at their additional features but at their basic method of cloning topics, which is central to both. The difference is this. In Idea you can "link" items only to elements of an outline structure. This is an outline structure one has presumably optimized for one's purposes. It is, so to speak, a priori, relative to the items that form the data. Documents can only be linked as 'children' to this structure, as contrasted with UR, which lets you link anything to anything but itself. In UR the clone of a parent can even be linked as a child of the parent's child.

Although I'm not privy to the developer's thinking, I suspect Idea! is motivated by recent work in library science on 'faceted classification.' It is quite the in topic in the knowledge management field. It requires an outline structure of keywords which satisfy certain constraints, but as a practical matter for personal knowledge management, these constraints, such as independent parent concepts, each with a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of children, are relaxed. You can see why an independently constructed outline would be necessary to implement this vision. I would at least suppose that this vision actually animates Idea! UR, on the other hand, appears to be animated by a purely original insight into the most direct way to impose hierarchical linkages on items with the least artificial constraints.

If anybody has any thoughts or information that can be leveraged to compare efficiency of Idea! and UR with different kinds of free form data, that could be very useful to everyone. A preliminary guess is that Idea! might be superior to the extent that the data can be approximated by a faceted hierarchy, but that begs the real question: how close is close enough.

InfoHandler implements a more rigorous version of faceted organization. I think it may do better with collections than free form notes, but I haven't actually tried it. It's hard to know how good any of these approaches really are without trying them, but trying involves a pretty major investment of effort. Clarifying the differences analytically, one can only hope, may bypass some of the trial and error.

Last edited by srdiamond; 11-25-2004 at 06:02 PM.
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